close your eyes and hope for the best

George Hunter 1945. (click image to enlarge)

Tapiti rushed over to the mance, found us all unconscious from carbon monoxide poisoning and had dragged us outside into the -40°F fresh air. All I remember is that I had one terrible headache that lasted a week. Tapiti had saved our lives.

As a photographer with the National Film Board Stills Division from May 1, 1945 through April 30, 1950, I kept suggesting assignments in Western Canada to be able to work out of my Winnipeg home for as much of each year as possible.

In February of 1946, after covering the Manitoba Music Festival, I received a telegram from Ottawa with cryptic instructions: “Contact M.D. 10 at Fort Osborne Barracks re photographing Operation Muskox.” I learned this project was to be a test of heavy-duty tracked vehicles traversing muskeg and tundra under severe Arctic weather conditions. It would be a joint venture by Canadian and United States armed forces. The rugged machines arrived in Churchill by rail and were to cross the Canadian High Arctic to arrive in Yellowknife by late March. The Iron Curtain was still a threat at that time. My assignment was to photograph the vehicles as they were being made ready for the expedition and to cover their departure. I would not be travelling with the moving contingent.

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George Hunter by Orland Gibson, 1944
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Then there was John Diefenbaker. I’ll always remember him placing his hand flat on top of my head and saying, “Son, mark my words, I’ll be Prime Minister of this great country when this great country celebrates its 100th anniversary in 1967. Son, mark my words”.

On the last afternoon of April 1943, when I was wondering what to do, I dropped by the Trib to say hello to Gib. Erling P. Gibson was chief photographer at the Winnipeg Tribune and I knew him from having carried out freelance assignments for the paper. His son, Orland and daughters, Lois and Fredl were friends. My visits were never more than ten minutes. When I was leaving, Gib said, “George, keep in touch with Mr. McIlroy (the managing editor), I may be retiring soon. Not right away. In a few months. Probably by summer.”

Arriving home an hour later, my mother met me at the door with a message to call a Mr. McIlroy. When I reached him, he was brief. He said, “Gib just quit. D’ya want his job?” Dropping by his office early next morning to discuss the job, I questioned the salary offered. I think it was a hundred bucks a week. His reply was that I shouldn’t worry about salary as the paper had an excellent pension program. I told him I wasn’t interested in a pension as I would only be staying two years, even though I didn’t have a clue what I would be doing after that. I started that day, May 1 and as it turned out, my last day at the paper was April 30, 1945, two years later to the hour.

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1941: George with his first car, a 1940 Dodge. Set up by George: shutter pusher unknown
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A car was essential to cover these jobs….
I don’t remember what it cost or how I managed to pay for it. It turned out to be one of the most trouble-free cars I have ever owned and lasted me through the end of the war.

The well-known CPR photographer, Nicholas Morant, whom I met through contract CNR photographer Harry Rowed, was indeed a character. As one of the stories goes, one day in Montreal he put Harry up to going down to Craig Street with him and buying a beaten-up park bench from a second-hand store for $15. They had it delivered to Dominion Square. With their bench set down on Peel Street across from the Windsor Hotel, they waited for a policeman to pass by on his beat. When one came within sight, Nick and Harry peered furtively from behind their newspapers every minute or two, quickly drawing back, and making the officer wonder what kind of no good bums he had there. With the officer’s suspicion fully aroused, Nick and Harry folded their papers, picked up the bench and began to walk away with it. The cop blew his whistle and apprehended them. Still carrying the bench, the cop demanded they walk with him to the police call box on the corner. It was before the days when policemen carried radios. When reinforcements arrived, the officer was asked what was going on. He told them he had two felons he caught steeling a city park bench. Nick and Harry quickly professed they weren’t stealing the bench and produced their receipt from the Craig Street store. I never heard what happened to the park bench after that. Such were the type of live wire and fun-seeking guys I planned to emulate in my photographic career.

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George Hunter with Korelle Reflex II at Grande Beach Manitoba, 1939.
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Press photography was in the transition era between flash powder and flash bulbs. …I rigged up my Korelle with a rudimentary flashgun. With tinfoil wound around the finger release button to make contact and a table lamp reflector mounted onto a flashlight to utilize No. 5 flash bulbs.

In keeping with Irving Penn’s edict in that folks are more interested in where you came from than where you are at, I will endeavor to recall some early happenings and photographic endeavors.

The year after my trip to England for the Coronation (1938) the travel bug caught up to me. I talked my Norwood (i.e. Winnipeg suburb) friend, Steven Putnam, into pedaling to Kenora, a hundred and fifty miles east of Winnipeg, in the Lake of the Woods region of Ontario. Our bikes were the standard for their day, being the single gear variety, great for downhill, but not for the uphill grind. Speaking of hills, we were severely reprimanded by the RCMP for doing 40 m.p.h. (64km.) downhill near West Hawk Lake. The officer claimed, that had we hit a rock or a pothole, we would have gone flying. We just about wrecked our bikes anyway as half of the Trans-Canada Highway was still gravel and quite rough.

The Kenora trip didn’t cure anything. A few weeks after that trip we took off again on our bikes - this time for Minneapolis/St. Paul, a distance of over five hundred miles (800 km.). It took five days each way. We carried sleeping bags but not a tent. One morning, having slept overnight in a farmer’s barnyard, we awoke to find representatives of all the farmer’s birds and animals forming a prefect circle around us. So perfect was the formation that we wondered if there was a circle etched on the ground where each placed its toes and dared not cross. They were curious to see who was invading their territory.

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George Hunter 1937
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One week when I wanted to see a street-corner circus with an elephant and trained fleas, I had to borrow 10c from my sisters. Mother said, “Don’t waste your money. You will see lots of flea circuses”. I have seen lots of elephants, but you know, I have never seen another flea circus.

It was Irving Penn, was it not, who proclaimed, “People don’t care where you’re at. They are more interested to know where you’re from”. Well, I’m from Saskatchewan, or as it is sometimes referred to, ‘Saskabush’. More precisely, I’m from good old Regina, Queen City of the Plains. I think of Regina as being in the centre of the Great Regina Plain, the country’s largest grain-growing area where farmers, unknowingly, create fascinating patterns that are best viewed from a low flying aircraft during harvesting operations. I never got tired of crisscrossing the prairies in search of these graphic scenes. Thinking back, I wish I had made lots more of them, especially with grain elevators included as these sentinels of the prairies have nearly all disappeared.

I’m from quite modest beginnings. My parents were from Ontario, my father being brought up on a farm near Peterborough and my mother being from Port Hope and a descendant of Roger Byam of Mutiny on the Bounty. Father, William Harold Hunter, was with Imperial Oil before I entered the scene but I knew him as a sales representative who travelled the length and breadth of Saskatchewan to visit dairies and bakeries for a waxed-paper company. With our comfortable cars and hard-surfaced highways, it is still a chore driving the province’s vast distances. In a Model T on gravel and dirt roads that turn to gumbo in rainy weather, it must have been arduous and treacherous. I only accompanied him on one or two short trips but it was enough to pique my interest in travelling. The Regina to Moose Jaw highway was my training ground when he taught me to drive. I was thirteen or fourteen years old.

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